Churches in Hawaii threatened by government...

A new law in Hawaii can force churches to make their property available to homosexuals for civil union ceremonies.  Under this law, if a church should refuse to allow the ceremonies on their property they could be subject to sanctions or fines.  See here.  In in its Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, No. 17, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith emphasized the fact that church property should not be used for promoting homosexuality in general or same-sex unions.  The CDF said that such activity, "..is contradictory to the purpose for which these institutions were founded" and that such activity would be "misleading and..scandalous."

Dignitatis Humanae of the Second Vatican Council insists that, "The freedom or immunity from coercion in matters religious which is the endowment of persons as individuals is also to be recognized as their right when they act in community. Religious communities are a requirement of the social nature both of man and of religion itself.


Provided the just demands of public order are observed, religious communities rightfully claim freedom in order that they may govern themselves according to their own norms, honor the Supreme Being in public worship, assist their members in the practice of the religious life, strengthen them by instruction, and promote institutions in which they may join together for the purpose of ordering their own lives in accordance with their religious principles.

Religious communities also have the right not to be hindered, either by legal measures or by administrative action on the part of government, in the selection, training, appointment, and transferral of their own ministers, in communicating with religious authorities and communities abroad, in erecting buildings for religious purposes, and in the acquisition and use of suitable funds or properties." (No. 4).

These rights are now under attack in Hawaii.  As the article notes, "Now churches throughout America await the effects of this dangerous law and the inevitable attempt by homosexual activists to force them to use their property in violation of their religious convictions."

Once again, homosexual activists are attempting to use force to impose their agenda. 

Related reading here.

Concern for national security or preparation for silencing the ideologically unwanted?

In a speech given this past summer, President-elect Barack Obama said, "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." (Read full story here).

Where have we heard this before? It was Adolph Hitler, writing about the creation of the Gestapo, who said: "An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation..We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland." And what was this "evil" Hitler spoke of? For Hitler, the Jewish People were an evil which needed to be eradicated. But it was not just the Jewish People who were viewed as "evil" by the Third Reich. But anyone who was deemed ideologically unsuitable. As Patrick mentioned in the comments section of the previous Blog post here at La Salette Journey, Dr. Leon Alexander, a psychiatrist at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, once explained how the Third Reich came to devalue ALL human life:

"The beginnings were at first merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived. This attitude in its early stages concerned itself merely with the severely and chronically sick. Gradually, the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted, and finally all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that the infinitely small wedged-in lever from which this entire trend of mind received its impetus was the attitude toward the nonrehabilitable sick."

Why do we suddenly need a civilian national security force? Is this desire for civilian security force connected in any way with the creation of civilian internment camps here in the United States?

It was my good friend of happy memory, Father Vincent P. Miceli, who said, "..St. Peter relates that he saw the evil spirits 'being drawn by infernal ropes into the pit of hell.' The attempt to rule heaven without God ended in enslavement in hell without rule, heaven or God. On the other hand, the faithful spirits won both heaven and the direct presence of God. 'For to serve God is to reign'...The same lesson is horrifyingly clear throughout all sacred and profane history: Whoever strikes against God strikes down himself. The atheist denying God degrades himself. The atheist exalting himself above God sinks below the level of animate and inanimate beings. Liberation from God is enslavement in creatures. Absolute humanism is the sure road to absolute despotism. Denial of God as truth begets the imprisonment of man in the self-imposed darkness of his own myths. Flight from total dependence on God guarantees for man the utter loss of his freedom in a brutal enslavement either to sheer anarchy or to the tyrant who must eventually arise to impose upon the chaos of limitless human liberty the artificial, inhuman order of the concentration camp." In the words of Pope Benedict XVI in a keynote address of the Fourth Bishops' Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center on "Moral Theology Today: Certitudes and Doubts," - given in February of 1984: "Only at the price of ignoring what is precisely human could the question of morality be analyzed in the ordinary way of human knowing. The fact that this is actually being attempted in various quarters today is the great inner threat to mankind today. The tree of knowledge, from which man eats in this case, does not give the knowledge of good and evil, but rather blinds man to discerning the difference between them. Man will not return to paradise through such blindness, because it is not based on a purer humanity but on the rejection of humanity."

Eventually this "inner threat" manifests itself externally: in the concentration camp (which might be euphemistically referred to as a "civilian internment camp"), in torture and in mass-genocide. But first it is necessary to demonize those ideologically unwanted people one wants to silence (or worse). Such people must be cast in the most negative light possible. They must be labelled as being somehow "backward" or "obsolete." They must be portrayed as people who are delusional and even perhaps dangerous. One might say something like the following to begin to raise public opinion against such ideologically unwanted people: "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest [read Bible-belt], the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." (See here).

Related reading here.